That Twilight female-soppy,pathetic,painful , Meg Cabot (aarrrrgghh) and Arundhati Roy (how could the supremely painful God Of Small Things win the Booker.
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That Twilight female-soppy,pathetic,painful , Meg Cabot (aarrrrgghh) and Arundhati Roy (how could the supremely painful God Of Small Things win the Booker.
Eh, who is to say really, beside some academic establishment. Is Rowling supposed to hold some literary merit beside the hook that keeps her readers coming back? She is fine in her own right, but I've heard they're teaching her alongside Dickens and Shakespeare and if she is what will be recalled hundreds of years from now as great then, sigh...
dickens...
i like Rowling and the Harry Potter series... held off for a while, but had to read it for a college class, and got hooked.
i'd go with Lovecraft.
you read it for college? how interesting- do you mind if I ask what the course was?Quote:
Originally Posted by vnnegt-ology
Haven't heard that one before but that's very intriguing- I've always enjoyed Lovecraft's works but I've never been able to get into them the way I feel other people do.Quote:
Originally Posted by imperiex
He was a very insightful guy. It's too bad he didn't write more. His stuff was always well done.Quote:
Originally Posted by hellodolly
I read (where?) that Capote, when discussing Jack Kerouac once commented, "That's not writing. It's typing." - Or words to that effect.
I agree with his appraisal.
Kerouac dissapointed me so much that I stopped reading On The Road by chapter XIII. He's not big deal after all.
And even though I don't like Capote as a short story writter, I agree 100% with him in that commentary on Jack Kerouac quoted by HelloDolly.
The author of Da Vinci Code. But I'm judging him based on this one book...
I didn't read this 41 page thread but, in case no one's brought it up, James Joyce is THE MOST overrated writer since cuneiform. Seems everyone's afraid to say it's crap.
What, because you couldn't understand it?Quote:
Originally Posted by March Hare
Portrait of the Artist is a good book, maybe an important one, but I guess that Joyce wrote that before he decided that he was Joyce. In any case, noone can compete with Proust; as an early editor said, Temps Perdu begins with a thirty page description of someone turning over in bed. And it only gets worse from there.Quote:
Originally Posted by March Hare
Thanks.
C.
That's right. Neither can you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Etienne
I don't like Joyce but to say to Etienne that he can't understand is rude.
One sentence does not satisfy on this topic. If you are going to make a claim that a specific writer is overrated, back it up. Modern popular writers, like J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown are low hanging fruit, but when you take shots at the names on the first page of this site, you really need to back it up. In these discussion threads, nobody polarizes the conversation as much as Joyce. But you just can't throw him out the window. He is acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of all time by people who are for the most part smarter than us. Ulysses is commanly at the top of those 100 best Novel lists (not just on it, but at the top). There must be something there.
I've never read Joyce with the exception of a short story or two long, long ago. I have no opinion of his work one way or the other, but I imagine he has earned his reputation.
These threads are silly and get sillier when someone inevitably brings up Joyce or Shakespeare or Twain or Dickens or Austen. What you are saying is that you set a level of expectations when you sat down to read an author's work, but were dissatisfied with the experience. That in no way means that the writer did not earn his or her reputation as a great writer 100s of years after their death. The weakness is not the ability of the writer, it's on the reader.
Thus, I believe the ability of the typical reader to fully understand what he is reading is overrated. I know this to be true of myself. I assume it to be true of the majority of posts in that past 41 pages.:(
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